H567/03 Section B Option 4 - Audience effects and home advantage

Facilitation, inhibition and co-action

Social facilitation is improved performance in the presence of others compared with an appropriate solitary condition. Social inhibition is impaired performance in their presence. The comparison must specify an outcome: a faster sprint, more accurate serve or fewer coordination errors. “More excited” describes a possible mechanism, not performance itself.

An audience observes a performer. Co-action means others perform the activity alongside them. A sprinter with people in the stands faces an audience; a sprinter running beside other athletes also faces co-action. Competition, pacing and encouragement may accompany human co-action, so its effects should not automatically be attributed only to being watched.

The same performer can show facilitation on a familiar action and inhibition on a new one. A basketball player may execute a well-practised pass more fluently before spectators but struggle with a recently learned deceptive pass. Being experienced in the sport does not mean every response in it is equally well learned.

Dominant responses and drive theory

Zajonc's drive account proposes that the presence of others increases general arousal or drive, making the dominant response more likely. A dominant response is the response most likely to occur in that situation; it is not necessarily the best response.

On a simple, instinctive or well-learned task, the dominant response is often appropriate. Strengthening it can improve performance. On a difficult, unfamiliar or insufficiently practised task, the dominant response may be wrong. Strengthening it can increase errors and impair performance. The theory therefore reconciles enhancement and impairment through the relationship between the response and the task.

Suppose a tennis player habitually uses the correct footwork for a familiar serve. Spectators may energise that useful response. If the player is learning a new serve but the old movement remains dominant, the same social arousal may make the old error more likely. The explanation concerns response learning, not a rule that every physically demanding task must be inhibited.

The next lesson examines Zajonc and colleagues' cockroach experiments. Running away from bright light was appropriate in a straight runway, but a maze required a different route. Those animals provided a test of the proposed social effect without relying on a human fear of receiving a poor sporting evaluation.

Drive theory is distinct from simply drawing an inverted-U curve. It predicts which response becomes more likely under social presence. Earlier arousal/anxiety teaching adds that excessive physiological arousal and worry can create other difficulties; neither account guarantees that more excitement always improves performance.

Evaluation, distraction and individual differences

In humans, an audience can also produce evaluation apprehension: concern about how others will judge performance. Being watched by a selector may produce greater concern than being near people who are not attending to the task. Perceived judgement can change arousal, attention and anxiety. It is a possible additional mechanism, rather than a necessary explanation of every social effect.

A distraction–conflict explanation emphasises competition between attending to the task and attending to spectators. A player monitoring a hostile chant may have fewer attentional resources for selecting a pass. A familiar response may survive that divided attention better than a complex decision. Audience noise and mere social presence are therefore different influences to investigate.

Skill, trait anxiety, confidence, recent mistakes and the perceived audience all affect responses. A confident athlete may interpret applause as support; another may interpret the same attention as pressure. An individual account alone cannot explain a change between quiet practice and a hostile venue, while a situational account alone cannot explain why teammates respond differently. Their interaction gives a more useful explanation.

To test mechanisms, hold the task and other conditions constant and vary whether observers can evaluate performance or whether distracting noise is present. Measure accuracy or time as well as the proposed arousal/anxiety change. Faster responses with more errors need not represent better overall performance. Theories should be judged against their specific predictions, rather than used as interchangeable labels after any result.